In software projects, stakeholders produce a lot of documents (for example, excel, word, power-point, etc.), especially in the early phases of the software development life cycle (SDLC). These can include, for example, project scoping, planning, requirements, etc. Additionally, stakeholders often prefer documents because they are easy to share with customers and take approvals, easy to read through and create a printable and/or recordable copy, and can be accessed from anywhere (Office tooling is ubiquitous).
However, information embedded in documents is difficult to reuse, and can include duplication of information across documents. Also, maintaining traceability is difficult and ensuring compliance to a common vocabulary is difficult as well. There is increased shift towards providing tools to stakeholders to capture the information they would have otherwise entered in documents in a model or structured format, however, there exists a need to produce similar documents to continue normal practices.